About this workspace Close Road Naturalist is an early research workspace. The pilot corridors use real road-centerline geometry from the U.S. Census Bureau TIGER/Line 2025 ROADS dataset, real U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service National Wetlands Inventory polygons, and real U.S. Geological Survey hydrography lines, so their EPA Level III/IV ecological context and their wetland and surface-water surroundings are calculated from real Oregon GIS data. Nothing here is a recommendation, a wildlife record, or a habitat-quality score; the access findings are dated, sourced, qualified evidence rather than a legal determination.
Geometry is not access. A named road in a government centerline dataset proves that the road is mapped, not that the public may legally or practically drive it. A mapped road/water intersection is a geometric crossing, not a bridge, a ford, or current water. Access stays unverified until the Investigator checks it. Species occurrence evidence comes from public iNaturalist and eBird reports: it records what people publicized, at the precision the source publishes. Obscured or imprecise observations stay regional evidence and are never measured against the road or plotted, and a public report is not a prediction that a species is on the road. Occurrence sources are queried only when you ask; eBird needs a server-side credential that this browser build does not hold, so it reports UNKNOWN rather than zero.
Access is a qualified finding, not a switch. The Investigator researches whether a road is a public road with ordinary motor-vehicle access and reports one of: verified public, probable public, unverified (the default), conflicted, or restricted/closed. It preserves the restriction itself (temporary, seasonal, permit-only, gated) and it never resolves a contradiction between sources by preference. Access evidence carries its source class (an authority acting in its own jurisdiction, government data, community mapping, or anecdotal web evidence), the verbatim text it came from, its retrieval date, and its effective dates, because a closure notice ages differently from a road centerline. OpenStreetMap is supporting evidence: an absent access tag means the tag is absent, not that the road is public. Every finding shows the deterministic guardrail rule that produced it, the adversarial concerns raised against it, and what remains unresolved — and a human finding is recorded beside the automated one rather than replacing it.
Future GIS results will carry source, version, coverage, and computation details. An Investigator may interpret and check them, but cannot create authoritative facts.
